Version 2026.7.22 – Readable maps, real waypoints and villages on stilts 🗺️

July 29, 2026

This update turns the planet map into a real navigation tool — and teaches the world generator to stop losing villages. Plus two cosmetic repairs that were long overdue. 🚀

You can finally read the planet map. The world-map icons used to be hair-thin line drawings — some lit as little as one percent of their pixels, the rest drowned in the terrain below. Now every marker is a bold, filled pictogram sitting on a dark backing disc, about one and a half times as large — and they grow along if you turn up the UI scale in the settings. The colours tell the truth again too: occupied landing pads are red (they used to render grey), waypoints amber (they used to render green), and the legend shows every marker in its real on-map colour — including the base icon, which was simply missing there before. 🗺️

Waypoints actually navigate now. A waypoint set on the map gets its own flag icon in the HUD compass with its own distance readout — until now it was a tiny amber square, near-identical to every beacon blip. Distances on the compass rim are log-scaled now: you can see yourself closing in on a target, instead of everything past 37 metres pinning to the rim. And a stale waypoint no longer survives the trip to another planet — the compass will never again point at a world you aren't even on. 🧭

No village gets lost anymore. Until now, if a world rolled a settlement, a bandit camp or a monument onto dramatic terrain, it was silently dropped — the world promised inhabitants and delivered emptiness. Now there's a placement guarantee: the search keeps widening until every rolled structure has a home. And foundations adapt to what they land on instead of flattening it: slopes get stepped terraces, rugged massif flanks get a shelf cut into the rock — and lakes now carry stilt villages on pile platforms, with drowned ruins nearby to dive. On lava plains a dead city may stand on a basalt plinth, and a vault under a lake rises as a diveable stone well head. All of this applies to newly explored worlds — existing ones keep their exact layout. As a bonus, the save now remembers where every structure stands: no future update can ever pull a village out from under its own blocks again. 🏗️

And two old annoyances are repaired: the menu dialogs (world options, account, settings …) are properly opaque again — the menu behind them used to shimmer through the text — and they all share one consistent darkening scrim now. And moons and neighbouring planets no longer hang in the daytime sky as black cut-outs: they're now pale and sky-tinted, like the real daytime Moon, and their night side stays a faint disc instead of vanishing into black. 🌗

Have fun re-surveying — and if you find a stilt village: we want screenshots! ✨